The prevailing approach of tax authorities to derivative-based hedging is that a party to such a transaction will qualify as a taxable person only if it is professionally engaged in executing contracts of this kind. But not always.
Businesses are often exposed to interest rate, commodity price or foreign exchange risks which require them to resort to risk management practices. One of the more popular of such practices is to transfer the risk to some other party which is willing to assume it, for a consideration of course.
These counterparties are typically financial institutions, such as banks. Interestingly, such risk transfers are increasingly often made using derivative instruments, for example options, forwards, swaps and other instruments whose price derives from the value of an underlying (an interest rate, a currency, a commodity, etc.).
The full text of the article by our tax advisor, Krzysztof Dżugaj, is available in the online version of Rzeczpospolita, the Dobra Firma weekly, and here.